Good advice as ever, Brian. I am wondering if when my BTC purchase clears on Friday whether BTC will be more down than Steem. It seems that when BTC is somewhat down, smaller coins tend to be down farther. I am hoping this is the case because if Steem falls relative to BTC I'll be able to get more Steem than I planned.

I am a bit wondering about why the whole crypto market seems to be continuing downwards this week, whether it has to do with the upcoming Bitcoin soft fork or just a periodic downturn. If this were the stock market I could go read dozens of analyses and opinions (most of which would likely be pure speculation) explaining what is affecting the markets this week/month. With cryptos it's all a bit mysterious.

By the way, what do you make of PlexCoin?

Interesting that you were buying real estate in Arizona in the 2010/2011 housing downturn. I bought my two Scottsdale rental condos in 2011 and 2012. My Mom still lives out there and I went out and stayed with her for a while when I took a break from New York. I was sitting on some cash from a previous job and ended up buying 2 properties for cash. Those two have done quite well for me as rentals and have appreciated nicely, though as you say, were not enough to make me a millionaire. However, and I hate to do "coulda woulda shoulda," I wish now that I had stayed at my job and taken out loans because I could have bought around 6 more units if I had financed these purchases. Each of these places is now worth around $150k so I would have had around $1.2 million in units by now, each one cash flowing nicely. Coulda woulda shoulda.